Exactly, now that we have solved that problem, you want to tackle the Middle East?
You make the policy in your own store only to the extent that it complies with the laws and the professional licensing provisions of your government. You can’t choose to discriminate if the government won’t let you. Your only choice can only choose to leave the business if you can’t accommodate yourself to the laws governing it.
But if you have made an intensely personal decision about your own body, how does anyone else have the right to interfere with it by withholding what you need to carry it out, and if there are no practical alternatives available to you? How can someone else’s version of morality trump yours?
Could you quote something in that cite that supports your statement? I’m not finding anything.
(Time to put on the shit-wading boots and join Shodan’s largely off-topic idiocy)
Shodan, I can’t believe I almost understand you. And the understanding I come to: you grossly misdefine “pro-choice.”
Pro-choice is for the woman who will either carry the fetus to term for nine months, or abort it. Pro-choice is for that woman to decide whether she will raise a child as her own or give it up to adoption if she does decide to bring the fetus to term. Pro-choice, in other words, is for the woman who will have to go through the pregnancy and the subsequent insistence in society that baby, once born and kept, is hers far more than the fathers. For the male population, pro-choice is about stepping back and having a little faith that a woman, knowing her circumstance far better than anybody else, should and will choose what is best for her. Be it abort, bring to term and give to adoption, or bring to term and keep.
Pro-choice is NOT the population of the world minus the woman in question choosing what is best for the woman. It is NOT the doctor or pharmacist (if I want to argue your ri-goddamn-diculous claim that birth control preventing conception is abortion) choosing their moral line because it is not the doctor or pharmacist who has to live with and provide for the child once born. It’s a hard pill to swallow (no pun intended), but really, pro-choice is not even the decision of the father independent of the mother. He is not the one who has to face the health risks associated with bringing a fetus to term, and he is not the one who will be saddled with the brunt of responsibility once the infant is born.
Pro-choice is for the woman faced with the choice. Not politics, not doctors, and certainly not you to say what my sister, female friends, or fiance would have to do in such a situation.
I agree, it should be a personal, private decision. However, the right to have an abortion, or even to prevent oneself from ever needing to have an abortion by using various birth control methods, is becoming pretty public.
And again, pharmacists are trained to distribute medication. During that training, they are educated on various medications, how those medications work and what they do, including but not limited to birth control pills and other contraception. They also know from the outset that if they are employed at a pharmacy, they will probably be asked to dispense contraception. So, knowing that, a pharmacist is arguably acting irresponsibly in accepting the position at all if he or she knows it will likely require him or her to perform an act they consider morally reprehensible, or to assist someone else to perform an act they consider morally reprehensible. In other words, unless you are willing to perform ALL the duties of your job, you should not accept said job.
I don’t think anyone should be forced to do something they don’t want to or feel is morally wrong; however, going into a career knowing at the outset that you will refuse to do part of your job, and knowing that that refusal can impact many lives, seems to me to be morally reprehensible.
I am sorry, I was talking about a hypothetical. I truly believe that it should be my policy, as the owner. If the law takes that away from me, I can find another state or another business.
I am uncertain how you cannot see this is a two edged sword. If my morality does not trump yours, yours will trump mine. Is that “righter?”
Near the bottom of the page:
Well, at least you are up front about the limits you would put on choice.
I think “choice” applies to everyone. It is your right to think as you like about abortion. It is my right as well. It is not your right to force your opinion about abortion on me. It is equally not my right to force mine on you.
You, apparently, disagree. It seems to be OK for a woman (only?) to overrule my decision and force me (if I am a pharmacist) to assist in abortions.
If you care to, perhaps you could expand on this. Is this right to overrule limited to women only? Would it be OK to force a woman pharmacist to assist in an abortion? A woman OB-GYN to perform one?
Are there circumstances where it works the other way, and it is OK to overrule the desire of some woman to obtain an abortion? Can we limit abortionists by gender, such that only woman are allowed to perform them?
It seems you limit the alleged “right to privacy” on which Roe v. Wade is based to women only. Did you have some cite from the text of the decision that shows that the justices intended this “right to privacy” to be limited to only one sex?
I assume you would have no objection to my characterizing one side of the debate to “anti-choice for men”, since this seems an accurate representation of the limits they would impose.
On preview:
I don’t see how this affects anything. You seem to be saying “nobody should be forced to do something they think is wrong unless other people want them to”.
It doesn’t help. And I can’t avoid a Godwinization:
“It was part of my job” didn’t go over very well at Nuremberg. Unless you are willing to say that people can be forced to do things they think are morally wrong if it impacts a lot of people. Wouldn’t establishing the principle “you better do everything your employer tells you even if you consider it morally repugnant” impact a hell of a lot of people as well?
Regards,
Shodan
Badly. It was not (IMO) justified, although a gray area. If abortion is evil, any action to assist a person in obtaining one is also evil. Where exactly you draw the line is more or less arbitrary.
Not as bad as denying people their right to freedom of thought on abortion, but bad enough.
Try taking the other side for a minute - do you feel that it would be justified to steal a prescription slip if you could thereby inhibit a murder? Would it be justified to steal a prescription slip if you could assist someone who needed an abortion in obtaining one?
Regards,
Shodan
No problem. Did you mean this one?
I am not anti-abortion. I am pro-choice. I do not believe that abortion is morally wrong, and would have no problem filling a prescription for an abortifacient drug (if I were a pharmacist) or performing one (if I were an OB-GYN).
But I am pro-choice. No one should be prevented from obtaining an abortion, or forced to participate in one. Choice means choice.
Just to go for the triple post.
Regards,
Shodan
You misunderstand. The difference: My opinion respects the right and ability of the pregnant woman to use her own opinion. She chooses the abortion, she chooses to bring to term. Either way, she chooses. Your opinion, as I read it, does not respect the pregnant woman’s, and does force itself upon her. Pro-life legislation, as I’ve ever understood it, necessarily states that the woman to whom the most risk and the most responsibility (especially after birth) will fall denies her any choice in the matter. It must be unfertilized egg -> attached zygote -> fetus -> human being. The pregnant woman cannot stop it at any time (specifically for the purposes of this post between egg and zygote (via contraception) or zygote and fetus (via abortion)). Try and force your opinion on me all you want; I’ll never have to deal with being pregnant. And I don’t know for sure, but from the way it sounds, neither will you. Just have some respect for the opinions of women who actually could be pregnant and desire such a choice.
Unsurprisingly, you entirely missed my point. To quote myself earlier:
It does not matter whether the pharmacist, doctor, lawyer, or politician is male or female. And I never said anything in my post to the effect, though you readily jumped to such a conclusion and rode it to ridiculous extremes. It matters whether the pregnant person is a female, and I can guarantee that exactly one million times out of a million. That’s the person with whom choice should fall. Anything to infringe upon her choice is a problem. You as a pharmacist, doctor, lawyer, politician, or male message board poster have a problem with the choice that individual pregnant woman would like to make? Tough, she’ll have to live with it, and not you.
And to pick nits, the “on preview” response of yours is directed at overlyverbose, not me.
I agree that nobody should be forced to facilitate abortions. Or birth control. Hell, nobody should be forced to facilitate teeth-brushing.
The problem, Shodan, is that pharmacists know quite well they’ll be asked to dispense birth control long before they become pharmacists. They take action moving themselves in that direction when they become pharmacists.
Deciding to become a pharmacist, being assigned to a pharmacy, where they dispense pharmaceuticals, passing yourself off as a pharmacist, and THEN deciding you’re going to refuse to do your job because of a moral quandary you should have known existed long before is exactly akin to someone joining the Marines, going through Parris Island and infantry school, getting assigned to an infantry unit, being shipped to a war zone and THEN saying “I refuse to fight, it’s against my religion.”
What would you think of someone who did that, I wonder? But I bet you’d be far more favourably inclined to someone who didn’t join the Marines in the first place, saying “the duties might call upon me to do things I can’t morally stomach.”
If some pharmacist feels the duties of their job violates their ethics or morals, then fine. They should do the courageous thing and find another job. If they refuse to do so, the state licensing board should help them along.
Shodan, you’re not this obtuse. Yes, a pharmacist has a right to refuse to fill a prescription on moral grounds. What he/she does not have is a right to a job as a pharmacist, if they are unable fulfill the job description.
If I work at Wal-mart, and I refuse to sell guns and ammunition to people because I am morally opposed to hunting, I should not expect to have a job for very long because I am not fulfilling the job duties.
A less hypothetical situation: I am training as a graphic artist. I could be very good at advertising. Conceptually and graphically, my ideas are well suited to selling things. However, I have big problems with the industry - in a nutshell I find the idea of manipulating people into buying truckloads of crap they don’t need reprehensible. Were I to take a job at an advertising agency, I’d probably be faced at some point with working on a project I couldn’t stand, and I would likely have to refuse to do so. I would expect to be fired. Ergo, I am not suited for the advertising industry and will not seek a job there, though my talents are suited for it and I have the schooling necessary to do so.
Why should pharmacy be any different from any other career one might choose?
I wasn’t arguing in favor of any unspecified pro-life legislation, I was discussing the OP.
And I am not advocating any infringement of the right of the woman to obtain an abortion, should she choose to do so. I am saying that she has no right to infringe on the rights of others who refuse to assist her.
My position forces nothing on the pregnant woman. She is free to pursue abortion with anyone who cares to assist and agree with her. She has never had any right to compel anyone to assist or agree with her, and so no interference with her rights has occurred.
The trouble is not her rights, which continue untouched. The trouble is with the rights of others, that she fails to respect.
If she wants to have an abortion, no one is trying to stop her (except in the fairly trivial matter of not handing back the prescription slip). But she is trying to prevent others from acting on their disagreement with her position. And that is not legitimate.
Well, OK, but perhaps when you post like this:
you may see why it might not be entirely clear. Otherwise, you would not have made the distinction. You explained your logic as “only women can be pregnant, therefore only women have the right to choose”. But men and women can be pharmacists, and therefore by my understanding, both men and women get to choose whether or not to obtain or assist in abortions.
My bad, then - sorry for the mistake.
Regards,
Shodan
See, I think the problem is that Shodan has the stronger argument here, regardless of the medical facts. Sure, to say that someone can’t have the pill even as a hormone treatment is as stupid as saying that they can’t have cold medicine because they could overdose someone on it and murder them. But when you start telling people that YOU DON’T EMPLOY that they must provide some service or else be fired, you’re not starting off with a very good argument to begin with.
Stealing is a crime though, and one without legal justification as long as contraception is legal.
I would guess that this is exactly what goes on in areas where they ban books. One or two people call the shots for the rest of the citizens.
OK, does that work the other way as well?
I posted a counter-example earlier. Theoretical Company X makes “not getting an abortion” part of their job description. It’s run by staunch Roman Catholics or something. If some woman then gets an abortion and is therefore fired, would you find that objectionable?
After all, it is “part of the job”. Right? So no problem.
Regards,
Shodan
Ok, ok, ok. I’m a pharmacist, I’ll weigh in.
First: in the US, each state Board of Pharmacy is allowed to set their own regulations, provided that these regulations are compatible with federal law. (For example, no state is allowed to place morphine over-the-counter.)
In Arizona, the state legislature is grappling with this “right of refusal” issue right now.
http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/news/59784.php
(hope the link works)
I work in a hospital, where I seldom if ever have to dispense BCP’s (birth control pills). There are hundreds of these jobs in my state alone. Drug reps, those folks who bring donuts and pens to the doctors’ offices to publicize new medications, are often pharmacists, and they don’t dispense at all. Neither do researchers. Any pharmacist working for a nursing home or hospice will have no birth control issues. Home IV services employ pharmacists who dispense no oral medication at all. My point: a pharmacist who refuses to dispense BCP’s is free to find a job that does not involve this task. We don’t all have to work at Walgreens. (Thank Og!!)
My own opinion? Pharmacy owners should be allowed to not carry BCP’s, just as these owners are allowed to not carry cigarettes. Pharmacists should be allowed to refuse to dispense for personal moral reasons without having their licenses yanked. HOWEVER–I would not protect them legally from being fired from a job they refuse to perform.
If a person refuses to touch meat, but wants to work at McDonalds, should this person be incarcerated, or prevented from working any food service job elsewhere? Hardly. The choices are: accommodation by management (“Okay, you can work fry station then”) or dismissal. IANAL–of course not, I just told you I’m a pharmacist–but I’ll bet there has been a similar case, where a person refused to do a job and was fired, then sued the company. I would love to hear about such a case if anyone knows of one.
If getting an abortion interferes with the woman’s ability to do her job, then I’d have no objection to that. I can’t really think of what sort of job that would be. Professional surrogate mother, perhaps. If it’s just, say, a secretarial job for people who really don’t like abortions, then your analogy fails, because having an abortion does not interfere with a person’s ability to file documents or answer phones.
Not quite the same thing. For a pharmacist, part of the typical job duties will involve dispensing birth control, and medications that will discourage implantation of a fertilized ova. If the pharmacist is not ok with that, he should go get a job in nuclear pharmacy or other specialty fields where it won’t be an issue. Or at the very least make it clear to his/her employer that handling contraceptives is something he won’t do.
Making “not getting an abortion” part of the typical job duties is more of a stretch.
Anyway, the pharmacist is often only guessing what the medication is for anyway. Said pharmacist won’t really know if I’m prescribing certain hormones to act as a morning-after pill, regulate ovulation, put an end to dysfunctional uterine bleeding, or treat severe dysmenorrhea or endometriosis. I can use the exact same medications to do all the above.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
Near the bottom of the page:
Conjunctions: tiny little words, but important. This doesn’t support a claim about any one of the three possibilities, taken singly.